Hard Drive Issue

[Spazmogen]

My Western Digital EIDE 160gb drive now apears in XP as 128GB, not the usual 149gb it usually was. Its a secondary drive, used for storage only. Its not bootable.

I had Norton GoBack installed and then removed it. I have a gut feeling that GoBack has altered my drive somehow.

I've tried fdisk, but it says that there are no more partitions on it.

I've also tried partition Magic, same thing: 128mb


Any ideas how I can get the missing GB's back?

[redk9258]

You could download software from their website (http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp?cxml=n&pid=999&swid=1) and zero fill the hard drive. This should make it as if it was new. Did something on your motherboard's bios change?

[Spazmogen]

I had a copy of Data Life Guard 10 (with 0's ability). I did that.
The Data Life Guard sees the drive as 149GB.

I did update the BIOS to F7 for the motherboard.

Perhaps I'll try FDISK again now that I've done the zero fill.

[Spazmogen]

thanks redk9258.

You got me thinking down another line, which solved the problem:

Update the driver on the ATA100 card.

Worked like a charm. The drive was attached to directly to my MB in the last system. In this build, I had to put it on the ATA100 card.

I was going at the problem by trying out the difficult stuff 1st (BIOS settings, XP Registry settings etc).

[redk9258]

Glad you got it! Have you found WD to be reliable? I have one that the bearings went bad on. It was replaced under warranty. The replacement seems to be holding up OK. I have had good luck with Maxtor drives. Some people say they aren't reliable either. I guess all brands can fail and the people who say X brand is no good had one fail while thousands of other people have no problems.

[Spazmogen]

lol. Murphy's Law.

The Wd 3 year warranty ended on Dec 25th.
The drive has just now developed a loud squeal, and seldom runs.
I tried it in the external USB 2.0/Firewire case and it still does it.

1 dead drive.

Good thing I pick up my 250gb SATA2 drive next week in Florida.